The Sunken Tower
And the flow of information.
The Rooster does not have the editorial standards of a traditional media outlet. That can be a bad or a good thing, depending on how you view it.
Take new Ohio House Speaker Derek Merrin (R-Monclova Township).
Where I see a privileged dipshit who has never had a real job and once tried to make it easier for slumlords to poison children with lead paint, the local paper of record sees a “tax policy wonk” and a “wunderkind.”
We got another example of the cognitive differences over the holiday weekend when The Dispatch reported on a “cracked column” in a construction project on Ohio State’s campus:
Ohio State University has temporarily halted construction on part of its new inpatient hospital tower after cracks were discovered in a concrete column.
The cracks were found Monday morning, prompting the university to pause steel work on the $1.79 billion additional tower at its Wexner Medical Center. The cracking appeared to be isolated to one concrete column and there are more than 60 additional concrete or steel columns on each level of the building, according to the medical center.
No pictures. No other source than university officials.
Later that night, I received pictures and some information from one of the few sources I maintain in the local construction industry from last summer when I spent six months roleplaying as a union electrician.
These were pictures my source wasn’t even supposed to have. At the very least, I knew these were pictures Ohio State would not want to be published for obvious reasons.
Whoopsie doodle! Sure, other columns support the building, but the pictures show this is much more than “cracks.” These are breaks in the pillar, and you already know somebody with a lot of money is about to get sued over the blunder.
I went about my night and honestly had forgotten about the incident. It’s a tweet, who cares? A surly bureaucrat from Ohio State shattered that tranquility by trying to intimidate me on Thanksgiving morning into deleting my “totally false tweet.”
Did I forge the pictures? No. I didn’t, which is why I rejected the “totally false” premise and ignored the email entirely. I’d rather eat glass shards than let some suit bully me into deleting a tweet, which is all he was trying to accomplish to get the pictures off the internet.
There is an outlet in town, however, that will print the words of a flak trying to spin an embarrassing situation in favor of the all-powerful local institution.
From dispatch.com:
Johnson said the pictures appeared to be from the worksite, but added that there was "no truth" to the reports in the Tweet by a local blogger that the tower was sinking or that the university was bringing in German engineers. The additional third-party engineer is from Chicago, he said.
How can he say there’s no truth when in the next breath, he basically concedes the pictures are from the work site?
Notice how the flak is the only source of information here. Nobody else is asked about the situation except the biased bureaucrat. It’s not just me talking about this.
Here’s a post from somebody who works in the tower. This is not my original source, either:
I trust sufficient testing was done. There are too many insurance policies at stake for that not to have happened.
But it doesn’t change the fact that the beam sunk—unless you trust one public relations gremlin who lies (at worst) and misleads (at best) by profession.
Why is he taken at face value when multiple construction workers on the scene are directly contradicting him?
As for the German engineers, well, all my source said was the word “trying.” If that’s bad information, so be it. That doesn’t change the information at the heart of the report. The failure was much more than Ohio State initially presented to the press, and the structure indeed sunk into the ground.
The Dispatch obviously has a policy against mentioning this deranged communist rag in their hallowed pages. That’s fine. I’m just some fucking guy. They’re an institution. We go about our jobs differently and fill different ecosystems.
But I’m getting tired of publishing dirt on powerful people and entities, only for The Dispatch to run to those same people and take their denial at face value.
Maybe they’ll go ahead and try that with Secretary of State Frank LaRose.
THOSE WMDs. Genetically modified tobacco plant produces cocaine in its leaves… 36 hours in São Paulo, Brazil… Riots work: An interview with Alex Mingus… The judge and the case that came back to haunt him… How stores end up with too many (wrong) clothes.
The metaphor for the local sporps team (gleamingly indestructible on the outside, cracked and sinking internally due to structural failures) seems a bit on the nose.